Does anyone have a system or method for managing digital calendars, some shared, in a way that doesn't, like, make you want to scream?

My wife and I each have our own Google Calendars. I'm trying to use my Nextcloud calendar more as the default. We also have a shared joint calendar for family activities... where I also sometimes schedule my own stuff just for visibility. We have a calendar for my daughter's school, and I have one for my work, which affects my busy/not busy status.

It all feels so crazy-making and disorganized. I want simplicity and organization. And, like, I know there's sense to be made out there, but I've been living with this hodgepodge system forever and I could use some light from the outside to help me reorient and find a better method.

I kinda want to try switching from Nginx Proxy Manager to Caddy, but the last time I tried to use Caddy as my reverse proxy, I could not get Nextcloud-AIO to properly set up.

Of course I can't just let "good enough" lie...

#selfhosted

Went out and pruned the blueberries in the sun while the Goblin napped. I'm about a month late here; March (and especially the last week) have been so sunny, the bushes have not only budded, but even started putting on leaves and a couple flowers. These bushes both need a more aggressive pruning than I gave them today—their tallest branches are as tall as me—but since they already have leaves, I didn't want to cut them back so far that they struggled.

It's been two years since we got a good harvest; last year, we both transplanted them and pruned them, so they were too shocked to put on any fruit in their new home. Next year, I'll have to catch them earlier so I can prune them back further.

Having blueberries in our yard is such a blessing.

It's so weird how when I try to navigate to the page in my ISP's customer portal where I can review the contracts we've agreed to, that page consistently gives me a "We're having trouble connecting to My Account" error.

How coincidentally weird, Xfinity! How strange!

#3GoodThings from today:

1. Today's service at my UU congregation, both the sermon itself (a meditation on the poetry of Mary Oliver) and the richness of being in a community with so many people.

2. The Goblin's coy smile when she was blinking the nap from her eyes and spotted me watching her.

3. Actually remembering to mount my drive after dismounting and fscking it. I always forget this step, then I reboot and things are unsurprisingly broken.

It was just this weekend that I read Cal Newport's advice in Digital Minimalism to schedule yourself "office hours" when you're open to drop-in conversations with friends. A day later, I saw not one but two folks who had their own office (or "un-office") hours listed on their personal webpages.

Well, I guess the universe was tryna send me a message, so I put a couple office hour blocks on my calendar this week and just got off the phone with a good friend. Turns out, talking to someone for an hour is a much nicer diversion than YouTube shit when washing the dishes and putting the house to bed.

I really hope @Bonfire succeeds in their vision for federated groups. This is so important for the fediverse and I can envision many use cases in my own life.

Sadly, I'm not in a financial position to support them right now, but I hope I will be sometime soon.

Why Community Matters: Groups as the Next Step for the Fediverse

Federated groups in Bonfire will be spaces where communities gather to organise, care, and coordinate across the fediverse.

^{bonfirenetworks.org}

As a hard leftist and gadget lover, the idea that my political ideology is synonymous with hating technology is confusing. Every leftist I know has a hard-on for high speed rail or mRNA vaccines. But the “left is missing out” blog positions generative AI as the only technology that matters.

The Left Doesn't Hate Technology, We Hate Being Exploited

Techno-cynics are all just wounded techno-optimists.

^{Gita Jackson (Aftermath)}

Hey, #cooking friends.

My wife has a habit that has never made sense to me: when she starts cooking on the stove, she often adds the first-step ingredients (like garlic, onion, etc.) to the cold pan with the oil, then heats them up together. This is in contrast to my approach, which is to heat the pan and oil and then add ingredients.

This goes against all my "this is how Cooking is done" senses, but I've realized I don't have a solid, fact-based argument as to why one should heat the oil first. I could probably sputter something about absorbing oil and cooking at a consistent temperature, but it's not exactly a very honed argument.

Is there such a reason?

I want to find #gamedesign resources for designing the artificial, algorithmic systems that govern a computer opponent's decision-making.

For as long as I've kniwn these have been known collectively as "AI", as in "pathfinding AI" or "enemy AI", and, well, you can see what my problem is in 2026.

The build is successful!

I finally finished* my TagTuner music jukebox and hooked it up to some speakers. It uses the ESPHome-based Home Assistant Voice PE as its brains and audio player, and when it scans NFC tags, it fetches corresponding media from my Music Assistant server.

I still have a couple bugs to work out, but this is definitely close enough to feel "ready".

I'm so happy to have a tool that will let us both (a) leverage my large home media server and (b) enjoy some of the benefits of physical media.

#physicalmedia #ESP32 #homeassistant #musicassistant #diy

sorry, this one's stuck in my head so y'all are getting it too

#music

Ants In My Room (Lyric Video)

Stream "Ants In My Room": https://cartervail.lnk.to/ants My New EP “Coydog” is out now!Stream It Here: https://cartervail.lnk.to/coydogCheck out my merch he...

^YouTube

I learned in the last year or so that I have a real fondness for folk, rebel, punk, and protest songs, especially in this moment. Music brings solidarity, not just with the people singing today, but with those who marched and fought before me, and I need that right now.

Maybe you do too. So I'm gonna start a thread here of songs and artists I find that resonate with me.

Today was going to be the day. The last shipment of parts arrived yesterday, so I was finally ready to assemble the TagTuner this morning. I'd spent a year or more procrastinating, several weeks beating my head against failed 3D prints, and another week sanding and staining the lid. I was honestly a little giddy when I tucked into bed last night.

And I got it almost all assembled, all the components into the 3D-printed case. All I had to do was put the lid, so carefully post-processed, on and fasten it.

It broke.

Three of the lid's four legs snapped off in the housings they were supposed to sit in. Superglue couldn't save them.

So it's back to the printer. And then the garage. And maybe by the end of the week I'll have a lid that will actually fit without breaking.

I came across #pico8 last night and it looks delightful.

I don't need any more hobbies right now, I really don't, but gosh, it's tempting to tinker with game development.

PICO-8 Fantasy Console

PICO-8 is a fantasy console for making, sharing and playing tiny games and other computer programs.

^{www.lexaloffle.com}

Ugh, I should really get back to practicing #lockpicking.

I was very gung-ho about it for a little bit, but then what always happens happened: it got tough (couldn't quite get the hang of feeling around the lock's guts, didn't know what I was doing wrong) and I got overwhelmed and dropped it.

But I want to have that skill at least somewhat developed.

It is annoying how frequently the solution to my weird avoidant mental blocks is to just talk to somebody about it.

I could save myself a lot of headache if I could just remember this fact and use it as a frontline response when I notice I'm spiraling and avoiding.

Finished The Age of Surveillance Capitalism.

This is possibly the most important book I've read in the last ten years.

What a brilliant, thorough exploration of this particular monster, how it grew, and what exactly we stand to lose if we don't check its power.

I'm stuck in #3Dprinting hell, trying to tweak printer settings just right so that the wood PLA I'm using will actually stick to the bed as soon as it extrudes instead of dragging for an inch or two before adhering. I've tried a clean bed, gluestick on the bed, increasing the first layer temperature, decreasing the first layer speed... there is so much spaghetti at the wall, and very little of it is sticking. Metaphorically and literally.

I just need this print to work, and then this project I've wanted to complete for over a year will be nearly done—but I'm going cross-eyed trying to get this right.

Because I'm a big nerd, I just wrote a whole-ass review of why this month's Item-of-the-Month in Kingdom of Loathing falls so flat for me.

#KingdomOfLoathing

December 2025 IotM Review: Dry Bones

The Skeleton of Crimbo Past offers unparalleled riches. So why isn't it fun?

^{Spencer Dub (Key and Card)}

Wake Up Dead Man.

Wow.

This is the cutest dang thing, oh my god

#3dprinting

Owlbox - RFID tag speaker for kids - Phoniebox by xtract MakerWorld: Download Free 3D Models

Owlbox: A Robust, Smart RFID Music Player for Kids (Phoniebox)Tired of screens? The Owlbox is a DIY, screen-free jukebox that's tough enough for toddlers and smart enough for your connected home.

^{makerworld.com}

I can't go to the restroom in a public entertainment venue like a concert hall or auditorium anymore without thinking about the vast disparity between toilet facilities per square foot in sex-segregated "women's" restrooms vs. "men's".

If you are a cis man who uses urinals, I encourage you to ask yourself, every time you're standing at a wall of urinals, how many toilet stalls would fit in the same space. Keep that in mind when you see the long line for the other restroom.

I'm excited about this one. Mended a small hole in my jeans using a Speedweve pocket loom I got a couple years ago. It's not perfect, but it works, and I have ideas about how to do better next time. Not bad for a first go.

#mending #visiblemending

Did anyone else who grew up in a house with carpeted floors like to rub their hands across the carpet very fast and feel how simultaneously smooth and tingly they felt afterwards?

Or was that just me?

I had to go unsubscribe from one of the streaming services—Glorp, I think, or maybe Jarbo—because I had used a free trial to watch the first two #Mariners games of the #ALCS.

First, I went to my TV's settings, but couldn't find an unsubscribe option, so I logged into my Treepy account on my desktop. But the unsubscribe option wasn't there, so I was redirected back to Roku, where I finally found the option to "turn off auto-renew". Not "cancel", though. "Turn off auto-renew."

And, it seems straightforward enough, and perhaps it is, but trying to navigate corporate websites in 2025 feels a bit like negotiating with a powerful and tricky genie. I'm staring down these subscription pages, trying to ensure I've done the right things so that I'm not going to get charged ONE HUNDRED DOLLARS AND NINETY-NINE CENTS in 24 hours.

Even when companies aren't using dark patterns, the general proliferation of dark patterns just leaves me jumpy and suspicious. So glad it's the future.

So, I was eyeing the Murena Fairphone 6 for my next smartphone, in an effort to #degoogle.

However, Google's latest fuckery with developer verification, and the apparent death knell it represents for F-Droid, makes me uncertain. I don't have the technical understanding of how the pieces fit together with alternative versions of Android.

Can someone more knowledgeable than me weigh in here? How is Google's developer verification for Android likely to affect alternative Android versions like /e/OS?

#Android #degoogling #fairphone

Murena Fairphone (Gen. 6)

THE MURENA FAIRPHONE (GEN. 6) WILL BE SHIPPED IN SEPTEMBER ! Brand new deGoogled Murena Fairphone (Gen. 6) ! The Murena Fairphone (Gen.

^{Murena - deGoogled phones and services}

The opening paragraph of this essay is so sharp it makes me jealous. Just trying to corral the words to describe what I like about it feels like I'm chasing a gaggle of runaway toddlers on trikes, while Burneko launches his motorcycle off a ramp, winks, and flips me off.

The first sentence is just such a clean, economical expression of contempt, and it sets the tone for the whole piece. Confident, clever writing like that always makes me think of Douglas Adams. If I have any writing goals, it's to write like that.

Only Kevin Roose's Editors Despise Him More Than I Do | Defector

Grave editorial failure only seldom can be located in something as precise as a single word choice. The following block-quoted sentence, from a Thursday article by New York Times technology reporter Kevin Roose, contains one, and it feels like journa…

^defector.com